Trump and the Truth: The Interest-Rate Flip-Flop

Donald Trump has by turns praised and vilified the Fed chair, Janet Yellen, and the Fed’s interest-rate policies, never acknowledging when he says precisely the opposite of what he has previously said.

Photograph by Spencer Platt / Getty

This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

Over the past year, Donald Trump, who famously never backs down, has attacked, backed down, and then again attacked Janet Yellen, the chair of the Federal Reserve. He has done it in his way, never acknowledging when he says precisely the opposite of what he has previously said. (Yellen, for her part, has ignored the whole thing.)

Trump’s Yellen cycle began in October, when, in an interview with The Hill, he accused Yellen of keeping down the Fed’s key interest rate, known as the Fed funds rate, because President Obama “doesn’t want to have a recession-slash-depression during his administration.” (This raised the question, of course, Who expects a President to want a recession-slash-depression?) By the spring of this year, Trump had revised his thinking about Yellen. “I have nothing against Janet Yellen whatsoever,” he told CNBC, on May 5th. “She’s a very capable person. People that I know have a very high regard for her.” Trump explained his newly rosy view by endorsing the very policy he had mocked a few months earlier. “She’s a low-interest-rate person; she’s always been a low-interest-rate person. And I must be honest, I’m a low-interest-rate person.” A couple of weeks later, Trump reiterated his happy view of the Fed chair. In an interview with Reuters, he said, “I’m not a person that thinks Janet Yellen is doing a bad job.”

This week, Trump was back on the attack. On Monday, he told CNBC that Yellen should be “ashamed” of the low-interest-rate policy that Trump himself endorsed so fully in May. “She is obviously political, and she’s doing what Obama wants her to do,” he said. Once again, Trump made the claim that there was a secret Obama-Yellen pact to keep rates low, rooted in their nefarious desire to prevent an economic crisis. They both knew, he said, that “as soon as [rates] go up, the stock market is going to go way down.” On Thursday, after giving a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump again took aim at the Fed. “The Fed has become very political,” he said. “Beyond anything I would have ever thought possible.”

It’s impossible to reconcile Trump’s conflicting statements on Yellen and the Fed’s interest-rate level. Low interest rates can’t be both smart policy and evidence of corruption, just like Yellen can’t be both “very capable” and a shameful Obama stooge. But beyond the contradictions, Trump has betrayed a basic misunderstanding of how central banks work. Take his statement that he and Yellen are both “low-interest-rate” people. Yellen, he said, has “always been a low-interest-rate person.” Central bankers like to say that the entire point of the Federal Reserve is to “lean against the wind,” meaning that, when the economy is growing so fast that it risks inflation, the Fed raises its interest rate, and, when economic growth is sluggish, the Fed lowers it. In the context of central banking, Yellen is often identified as a “dove,” which means that she is generally a bit more concerned about lowering unemployment than about the risks of inflation. But calling Yellen a “low-interest-rate person” is like calling a doctor concerned about a patient’s high fever a “low-temperature person.” Yellen, like all central bankers, is not a low-interest or high-interest person. She’s a person for whatever interest rate is appropriate, given economic conditions. In her two decades of votes as a senior Fed official, she has voted for higher rates plenty of times.

Where Trump is most clearly and dangerously wrong is in his accusation of political interference by the White House. Yellen doesn’t make decisions about the interest rate on her own. As chair, she has one vote on the Federal Reserve’s twelve-member Open Market Committee, which is currently made up of five members appointed by President Obama and seven members who come from regional Federal Reserve banks and who are chosen by their own boards, made up of bankers, businesspeople, and, in some cases, community representatives. It’s a diverse lot—several members of the committee have shown no particular loyalty to the President. What’s more, the board’s decision-making process about the interest rate is public. We know how each of the twelve members vote at each meeting of the committee. The Fed even releases a “dot plot,” which shows how the different members expect to vote over the coming years.

This publicness has been designed for good reason. The Fed funds rate is the interest rate at which banks lend money to one another for overnight loans. In practice, this rate sets the tempo of the entire global economy, and changes to it ripple through every aspect of our economic lives. Sudden and unexplained moves would create panic. That the Fed hasn’t raised its rate since December cannot be explained as some nefarious plot jointly concocted by Obama and Yellen. It is fully explained by a board of technocrats studying the data and coming to pretty much the same conclusion that nearly everybody else who looks at the data reaches: our economy is still in a period of sluggish growth and, despite Tuesday’s cheery economic news, a Fed-induced tightening could send millions of Americans back into unemployment and generally wreak havoc on the economy—a point Trump himself endorsed in his brief pro-Yellen phase a few months back.

The Fed is far from perfect and has earned its share of fair criticism. But what makes Trump’s views on central-bank policy particularly troubling is that it is impossible to know where they are coming from. The next President will be able to select a Fed chair and several Federal Reserve governors. By this point in a Presidential election, the major-party candidates’ economic preferences are typically well established, and usually embodied by their economic advisers. Whether you embraced them or despised them as candidates, since the nineteen-seventies, the major-party candidates have made it relatively easy to know how they would approach the Fed if elected. Notably, candidates in recent decades have all shown enormous deference to the Fed as an independent, nonpartisan institution. Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama all reappointed the Fed chair of their cross-party predecessor. Trump has said he will not reappoint Yellen to a second term. So how would he pick her successor? What framework would he use?

Trump’s economic advisers can for the most part be placed in one of three groups. In the first are Larry Kudlow and Judy Shelton, the intellectuals of the bunch, and both advocates of a return to the gold standard. While it has become popular among some Republicans in the past few years, returning to the gold standard is dismissed as a discredited, fringe idea by nearly all economists and market participants. And, for their part, gold-standard supporters typically reject the very idea of a Federal Reserve, so if Trump were to appoint Kudlow, Shelton, or another gold-standard supporter to the Fed, it would be the most radical and potentially damaging economic move since the dawn of our modern economic system, after the Great Depression. (Just how awful an idea returning to the gold standard would be is difficult to convey in a short space, but it’s worth pointing out that, under the gold standard, recessions and deep depressions were frequent, and the central bank and government officials had no ability to respond.)

The second group of Trump advisers is, famously, made up of businesspeople: all those Steves—Feinberg, Mnuchin, Roth, Calk, and the others who come from real estate and finance. As a group, they, like Trump, have not expressed great knowledge of or interest in monetary policy.

Finally, there’s the group represented by Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker and Breitbart News chief now heading Trump’s campaign. Bannon has not talked much publicly about his views of the Fed. But his deep association with the alt-right is worth examining: some on the alt-right have expressed contempt for the very idea of a healthy economy. A guide to the alt-right, published by Breitbart in March, identified a subset of the movement, known as “natural conservatives.” For these people, the authors explained, a strong economy isn’t necessarily something to wish for. “Culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value,” the guide states. “More specifically, [natural conservatives] value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters.” This outlook was contrasted with the views of “an establishment Republican,” who has an “overriding belief in the glory of the free market, [who] might be moved to tear down a cathedral and replace it with a strip mall if it made economic sense.”

Reading these passages helped me understand something that I had found confusing. In reading stories on Breitbart and other sites connected to the awful alt-right movement that Trump has embraced, I found it impossible to identify any overarching view of how the economy should work. There were sloppy and occasional potshots at Obama or Yellen, and a general contempt for the many institutions of modern liberal society. But there were no coherent economics. Which brings us back to Trump’s own views. He has no coherent plan, no view that can be mapped onto the common range of established discussion, whether left, right, or center. On Thursday, Trump’s campaign released his “economic policy.” Amid the assertions that a dramatic cut in taxes and regulation will lead to more economic growth and higher employment, there is no mention of the Federal Reserve. Instead, Trump has offered the public a general, instinctive contempt for the Fed and its policies.

On Thursday, at the Economic Club of New York, Trump was asked specifically how he would advise the Fed, and his answer was filled with as much narcissism and nonsense as any he had given before. “Well, as a real-estate person, I always like low interest rates, of course,” he said. “Obama wants to go, he wants to play golf, and he wants to leave. He doesn’t want to have any stock-market disruptions. . . . I think the Fed is totally being controlled politically.” He concluded, “I really believe if it was a political decision or the right decision, they’re going to go with the political decision every time.”

What would a President Trump’s monetary policy be? Judging by his words and the people with whom he surrounds himself, the options appear to range from fringe kookiness and ignorance all the way to nihilistic collapse.